12-08-2025

🚀 Configuration UI Overhaul & Core Model Updates

This release focuses on significantly improving the usability of the dashboard's configuration and settings pages. We've introduced a major UI overhaul to reduce clutter and fix common workflow annoyances. Additionally, we've updated core data models and logic to make the system more robust and flexible for future enhancements.

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✨ A Modernized Configuration Experience

The App Configuration and Settings pages have been redesigned to be more intuitive and less overwhelming, especially for complex setups.

Our Goal: To improve navigation and reduce visual clutter, allowing administrators to focus on one section at a time without getting lost on a long page.

• Collapsible Sections: All major configuration areas are now wrapped in collapsible ExpansionTile widgets. You can now expand only the section you need to edit, keeping the rest of the page tidy.
• Intuitive Text Editing: We've fixed a common Flutter UI issue where the cursor would jump to the beginning of a text field during an update. The cursor now correctly stays at the end of the text, providing a much smoother editing experience.
• Dynamic Decorator Management: The "Feed Decorators" section is now more intelligent. It dynamically displays all available decorator types, even if they aren't configured yet, making it easier to manage all options from a single place.

🛠️ Foundational Upgrades & Refactoring

We've made several important changes under the hood to align with recent API updates and improve maintainability.

• Introducing "Feed Decorators": The old "Account Actions" system has been refactored into a more flexible "Feed Decorators" system. This provides a clearer and more powerful way to configure how content is presented in the user's feed.
• New Language Model: The dashboard no longer treats language as a simple text string. It now utilizes a proper Language object, ensuring more robust and consistent handling of language-specific settings.
• Centralized App Constants: Common values, like the maximum app width, have been moved into a central AppConstants class. This improves code organization and ensures consistency across the application.

🐛 Other Fixes & Improvements

• Remote Config Fix: Corrected a bug where timestamps (createdAt and updatedAt) were not being handled properly when updating a remote configuration.
• Expanded Localization: Added new translation keys to support the new "Feed Decorators" system and to provide localized names for user roles and enums.
• Dependency Updates: Several packages have been updated to their latest versions, including go_router, to ensure the project remains secure and up-to-date.

03-08-2025

🚀 Release: Archiving, Data Loading, and UI Enhancements

This release introduces significant backend and data handling improvements to the dashboard. The changes focus on ensuring data integrity through a new archiving system, intelligently working around UI component limitations for data loading, and refining the overall user experience.

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🗑️ Content Archiving for Data Integrity

We've implemented a content archiving workflow to act as a soft-delete mechanism. This was a necessary architectural change driven by how our document-based backend operates.

Technical Rationale: Directly deleting a document (like a 'source') could break data integrity, as other documents (like 'headlines') might still reference it. Archiving preserves these essential links while effectively removing the content from active use.

• New Workflow: Instead of being deleted, content items are now moved to an 'archived' state. New pages have been added to view and manage this archived content.
• Controlled Deletion: To maintain data integrity, only the primary container item—a headline—can be permanently deleted, and only from within the archive page itself.
• Undo Safety Net: A 5-second "Undo" option now appears after a headline is permanently deleted from the archive, providing a buffer to prevent accidental data loss.

⚡ Refactoring Data Loading for UI Consistency

This release changes how we load data into dropdown menus (e.g., country and language lists). This was a deliberate engineering tradeoff to maintain a consistent UI across the app.

• The Challenge: The standard DropdownButtonFormField widget we use for UI consistency does not support scroll detection, making it impossible to load more data as a user scrolls (on-demand pagination).
• Our Solution: We now pre-fetch the required data. When a form is opened, a ThrottledFetchingService intelligently loads the complete list of items in the background. This process is designed to be efficient and not block the UI.
• The User Experience: While the data is being loaded, the dropdown is temporarily disabled and shows a "Loading full list..." message. Once the fetch is complete, the dropdown becomes active with the full list of options.

🛠️ Other Notable Improvements

• Authentication Polish:
  • A 60-second cooldown has been added to the "Send Code" button to prevent abuse.
  • The verification code entry now uses a cleaner Pinput widget for a better visual experience.
• Reactive Dashboard: The main dashboard summary now listens for content changes and updates its statistics automatically, eliminating the need for manual refreshes.
• Consistent Data Sorting: Fixed a bug to ensure all content lists are now correctly sorted by their updatedAt timestamp, always showing the most recently modified items first.
• Active Content Filtering: Data fetches for content management now correctly filter out archived items, ensuring only active content is shown in lists and forms.

23-07-2025

🚀 Foundational Refactoring & Rebranding

This release introduces a breaking, project-wide refactoring to standardize our internal package structure and update the project's public-facing brand. The ht_ prefix has been removed from all internal packages to improve clarity and maintainability.

This is a comprehensive change that touches nearly every file, re-establishing the project's identity and creating a cleaner, more conventional codebase for future development.

✨ Key Changes & Enhancements

Package Renaming & Standardization

• Internal Packages Renamed: All internal packages, previously prefixed with ht_ (e.g., ht_auth_repository), have been renamed to remove the prefix (e.g., auth_repository). This required a complete update of all import statements and class references.
• Standardized Error Handling: As part of this effort, the custom HtHttpException has been replaced with the more standard HttpException type across the application.

Branding & Documentation Updates

• Project Rebranded: The project's public-facing brand has been officially updated from "Headlines Toolkit" to "Flutter News App Dashboard".
• Documentation & Metadata Updated: This new branding is reflected across the README.md, the web page title, and the manifest.json application name.

🔧 Tooling & Maintenance

• Dependabot Configuration: The Dependabot configuration has been updated to explicitly list the newly renamed internal packages, ensuring our dependency management tools continue to work correctly.

21-07-2025

🚀 Architectural Refactor: Adopting the Shared UI Kit

This release marks a substantial architectural refactoring of the dashboard application, focused on centralizing our user interface components and standardizing the look and feel.

We have migrated all common UI widgets, themes, and utilities from the local lib/shared directory into our new, shared ht_ui_kit package. This change significantly reduces code duplication, ensures a consistent visual experience across our suite of apps, and improves the long-term maintainability of the codebase.

✨ Key Changes & Enhancements

• Shared UI Kit Integration: All common UI components, including spacing definitions, themes, and shared widgets like FailureStateWidget and LoadingStateWidget, have been moved into the ht_ui_kit package.
• Centralized Localization Access: The method for accessing localized strings has been standardized. The application now uses the AppLocalizationsX(context).l10n extension provided by the UI kit, ensuring consistency.
• Simplified Project Structure: The local lib/shared directory and its contents have been removed, resulting in a cleaner, more streamlined project structure with less redundant code to maintain locally.
• Dependency & Code Cleanup: Dependencies have been updated to align with the new shared packages. Obsolete logic, such as local timeago messages and the kIsWeb parameter for the HTTP client, has been removed as this is now handled by the shared libraries.

14-07-2025

✨ UI Overhaul & Foundational Refinements

This release introduces a complete overhaul of the App Configuration screen, making it significantly more organized and user-friendly. Alongside this visible change, we've executed a major refactoring of our error handling and localization systems, resulting in a more robust, maintainable, and stable application.

🎨 UI Overhaul: Tab-Based App Configuration

The App Configuration page has been completely redesigned, moving from a single long list to a clean, tab-based interface. This makes it much easier and faster for administrators to find and manage specific settings.

• Categorized Settings: Configurations are now logically grouped under new 'Feed', 'Advertisements', and 'General' tabs.
• Improved Modularity: The previous 'Operational Status' section has been split into more focused 'Maintenance Mode' and 'Force App Update' sections for better clarity.

🛡️ Robust Error Handling & Stability

The application's error handling system has been fundamentally refactored to be more structured, informative, and user-friendly.

• Exception-Driven Errors: We've replaced simple string-based error messages with a structured, exception-driven approach (HtHttpException). This provides richer information for both debugging and user feedback.
• Localized, User-Friendly Messages: All user-facing error messages are now context-aware and localized, providing clear, helpful feedback instead of generic error text. A central FailureStateWidget ensures this experience is consistent across the entire app.

🌍 Enhanced Localization & Code Maintainability

A major effort was undertaken to improve our internationalization infrastructure and overall code quality.

• Centralized UI Text: Numerous hardcoded UI strings (labels, descriptions, prompts) have been migrated into our localization files, making the app easier to translate and maintain.
• Dynamic Localization: The system now supports dynamic localization, allowing UI text to adapt based on user context, such as their role (Guest, Standard, etc.).
• Improved Maintainability: To reduce errors and improve readability, hardcoded repository IDs have been replaced with named constants, and redundant code comments have been removed.

13-07-2025

🚀 Major Architectural Refactor & Content Management Overhaul

This release introduces a significant architectural refactor of the application, aligning the data models and state management with recent backend updates. We have renamed core data models (Category -> Topic), overhauled the AuthenticationBloc for better consistency, and introduced dedicated UIs for managing content types.

These changes establish a more robust, maintainable, and consistent foundation for the application, while also enhancing content management capabilities.

✨ Key Features & Enhancements

Architectural & Core Model Updates

• Core Model Renaming: The Category data model has been renamed to Topic throughout the entire application, including repositories, BLoCs, and UI components. Similarly, AppConfig is now RemoteConfig to better reflect its purpose.
• Centralized App Configuration: Application status and update settings are now cohesively managed within the RemoteConfig model, providing a more streamlined approach to configuration.

Enhanced Content Management

• Dedicated Topic Management: The app now features dedicated pages and business logic (BLoCs) for creating and editing Topic entities, providing a structured UI for managing content categories.
• Richer Headline Data: The Headline model has been enhanced with new fields, including excerpt (which replaces the previous description field) and eventCountry.

🔧 State Management & Technical Refinements

• Refactored Authentication State: The AuthenticationBloc has been significantly refactored. Its numerous states have been consolidated into a single AuthenticationState class, managed by an AuthenticationStatus enum, which simplifies state transitions and improves code maintainability.
• Updated Role Management: The AppBloc has been updated to align with the new DashboardUserRole and AppUserRole enums from the backend, ensuring user permissions are handled correctly.
• Structured Logging: The logging package has been integrated across key BLoCs, replacing print statements with structured and more informative logging.
• Improved Data Querying: Data fetching operations now consistently use PaginationOptions and SortOption objects for clearer and more flexible API queries.
• Dependency Updates: Several internal ht-* package dependencies have been updated, and new packages like logging and uuid have been added to support new features.

05-07-2025

🛡️ Authentication Overhaul & UX Refinements

This release introduces a major overhaul of the application's authentication system to align with recent backend updates. We've also focused on enhancing the user experience with full localization of the sign-in flow, a more helpful demo mode, and polished UI refinements on the dashboard.

🔐 Authentication System Enhancements

• New Role-Based Authentication: The core authentication logic has been refactored to support a new multi-role system. The app now validates users based on an array of roles (e.g., admin, publisher), making our permission handling more flexible and robust.
• Fully Localized Sign-In Flow: All hardcoded text has been removed from the authentication and code verification pages. UI text like headlines, subheadlines, and hints are now sourced directly from localization files, improving maintainability and ensuring a consistent experience in all supported languages.
• Improved Demo Experience: To make testing easier, the login and verification pages now display helpful hints with demo credentials, but only when the app is running in the demo environment.
• Enhanced Error Handling: The sign-in process is now more robust, with more granular error handling for specific issues like Unauthorized, Forbidden, or NotFound exceptions from the API.

✨ Dashboard & UX Improvements

• Improved Visual Hierarchy: The "Quick Actions" card on the dashboard has been refined. The 'Create Category' and 'Create Source' actions are now styled as OutlinedButtons, visually de-emphasizing them to establish 'Create Headline' as the clear primary action.

🔧 Technical Refinements

• Dependency Updates: Core authentication and shared utility libraries (ht-auth-*, ht-shared) have been updated to their latest versions.
• Code Refactoring: The management of the application's environment state within the AppBloc has been streamlined for better clarity.

04-07-2025

🚀 New Dashboard Overview Page

This release introduces a new Dashboard Overview page, which now serves as the central landing hub for the application. This new page provides administrators with an at-a-glance summary of key application metrics, a feed of recent content activity, and quick access to the most common management tasks.

The overview page is designed from the ground up to be fully responsive, ensuring a seamless and adaptive experience across all screen sizes. This provides a more powerful and intuitive starting point for all administrative workflows.

✨ Key Features

• Central Hub: The new overview page acts as a central home for the app, displaying a comprehensive summary of statistics (total headlines, categories, sources) and recent activity.
• Streamlined Quick Actions: A refined "Quick Actions" card offers convenient shortcuts to Create Category and Create Source, making common tasks faster.
• Robust State Management: A dedicated DashboardBloc has been integrated to efficiently manage data fetching and state for the overview page, ensuring a reliable and responsive experience.
• Full Internationalization: All new UI elements on the overview page, including titles, stats, and actions, come with full localization support.

🎨 Responsive Design & UI Enhancements

• Adaptive Layout: The new Dashboard Overview page is fully responsive. Summary cards and the main content area intelligently rearrange themselves to provide an optimal viewing experience on both wide and narrow screens.
• Polished UI: The "Quick Actions" card has been refined using ElevatedButton.icon for a consistent and visually appealing design that improves usability.

03-07-2025

🎉 Enhanced Content Management System

This release introduces a major overhaul to our content management system, focusing on providing administrators with more granular control and improving the overall user experience. We've introduced a complete Content Lifecycle Management system, allowing content to be marked as Active, Archived, or Draft.

Alongside this, we've significantly refactored our state management for a faster, more responsive UI. Instead of re-fetching data after every change, the app now intelligently updates its local state, resulting in a snappier experience. Automatic timestamping for content creation and updates has also been integrated to enhance data integrity and visibility.

✨ New Features & Enhancements

• Content Lifecycle Management: Introduced a ContentStatus field (Active, Archived, Draft) for Categories, Headlines, and Sources. This allows administrators to manage the entire lifecycle of content directly within the system.
• Automatic Timestamps: All content items now automatically receive createdAt and updatedAt timestamps. The updatedAt field is now displayed in the UI in a dd-MM-yyyy format, providing clear visibility into when content was last modified.
• Enhanced UI for Content Management:
  • Added dropdowns to the create and edit forms for selecting an item's ContentStatus.
  • Updated table views to display Status and Last Updated columns, providing a more relevant overview of content.
  • Table rows are now selectable, allowing for quick navigation to the corresponding edit page.
• Localization Support: Added new localization keys for "Status", "Last Updated", and the different content statuses to support internationalization.

🚀 Performance & UX Improvements

• Optimized State Management: The ContentManagementBloc has been refactored to update its state locally after an item is created, updated, or deleted. This eliminates the need to re-fetch the entire list from the server, leading to a significantly more responsive and efficient user interface.

🔧 Fixes & Refinements

• Code Quality Improvements: Refactored BLoC states and events to incorporate the new ContentStatus field. Improved type safety and immutability using sealed and final classes, refined Equatable props, and removed various unused imports.
• Dependency Updates: Updated several dependencies to their latest versions, including go_router, device_preview, and freezed_annotation, and bumped the Flutter SDK constraint.

02-07-2025

What's Changed

• Feature content management create category by @fulleni in #15
• Feature_create_source_within_content_management by @fulleni in #16
• Fix data fetching in content management by @fulleni in #17

Full Changelog: 01-07-2025...02-07-2025